Mortgage lending institutions often need to understand the markets in which they compete so that they can determine which segments of a market to target their products and/or services. Many mortgage lending institutions tend to focus on traditional markets and they do not generally respond to changing trends and/or demographics. These institutions also tend to forego hiring outside consultants due to costs and time constraints. As a result, there is an incomplete understanding of potential markets that leads to missed marketing opportunities for these institutions and may cause them to under serve potentially strategic markets.
Mapping tools have been developed to generate maps for the mortgage lending industry. These maps are based on specific geographic and demographic data. However, the information sources connected to current mapping tools are minimal. Moreover, these mapping tools do not provide filtering options that are needed to customize the data required by each mortgage lending institution to understand strategic markets. Without filtering the data that is presented to an institution, the institution is required to expend significant resources to seek out data that is necessary in making business decisions. While there are current marketing software that provide mapping and data mining capabilities, these software are not suited to the mortgage lending industry.
What is needed is a cost effective system and method that provide accurate, comprehensive and timely geographic and demographic lending results to lending mortgage institutions.